And so the holidays pass, the biting Minnesota winter encases us all, and January, a month that breathes like no other, delivers its bitter winds to our ruddy cheeks, swirling around our limbs and settling in the very marrow of our bones.
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Like a bright light that illuminates a roach-filled basement, the new month appears and the affluent scatter, bragging to those down south of their upbringing on the tundra but showing an unwillingness to bear another cycle of its cruelest season.
Those of us who remain find ourselves in the coffee shops and bars, our backs toward the windows, focusing instead on varnished wood, steaming mugs, brass rails, and golden lampshades, anything but the inhospitable vista on the other side of the frozen panes.
In St. Paul, a hearty few busy themselves preparing for the Winter Carnival celebration. This is the month St. Paul chose for toasting the good life in this region. They opted for drinking, singing, competing, and parading as an alternative to crying "uncle." For early settlers it must have been a survival mechanism; for today's throngs it's more of a boredom killer, a panacea to creeping cabin fever.
The quirky, distinctive feel that Minnesota holds for its natives cannot be fully separated from the glacial textures of the month of January. Winter's vagaries influence and shape its people and have a disproportionate role in the creation of the Minnesota personality and character. January is isolating and isolated. Its bordering months are more reasonable and closer to seasons more civilized, but January is the month that has made us more of who we are. It sits alone atop the calendar with a stoic stare that has molded our disposition. Even in July, many of us carry its shadow in our psyche. A summer visitor from the tropics will sense the snow in the whites of our eyes if he or she stares long enough.
The notion of community is something wholly different in the throes of January. Strangers seem more like relatives. We share a hibernal otherworld and deliver knowing grins, or furrowed brows, with a group understanding of the seeming perversity of it all. Together we ponder the brutishness of the natural world and its odd penchant for annually hurling arctic anguish our way. Why, we wonder, were winter and humanity brought to live together on the same planet at the very same time?
January doesn't get easier as we get older, but over time its annual grip erodes the knee-jerk complaints and produces weary resignation. We know the month will pass; it always does. And while it's here, we'll gravitate to the many shelters that dot our landscape: shopping malls, skyways, a heated garage, a domed stadium. The city is an oasis of 70-degree ports-in-a-storm. To fully appreciate them, stand in the middle of a frigid central Minnesota farm field and ponder what this part of the country felt like when it was just nature and man, before the north was tamed and pacified, back when some bearskin-wearing St. Paulite said, "Let's have our carnival now rather than springtime. Break out the bubbly while the horror show is still in high gear."
The organizers of the Winter Carnival are advertising this year's bacchanalia as "11 days of heaven," knowing full well that no one in the history of the north has paired the term "heaven" with an outdoor event in January. "Bold," yes, "brash and rebellious," certainly. But "heaven?"
Heaven in January is a fireplace and a glass of Jameson; it's a car with seat warmers; it's the way the body responds to crossing the threshold when moving from outdoors to indoors; it's when the temperatures surprise and creep into the high 20s, where shoulders can lower and eyes can rise upward into the kindly blue sky; it's the warm, friendly house party, so potent in its joyful release that it's talked about for days.
Heaven in January is a down comforter in the icy gray dawn, a flask at an ice rink, an easy chair and a football game on a 50-inch plasma TV.
If St. Paul thinks it will create heaven in a festive frozen street parade, a frigid 5K run, or a snowy outdoor treasure hunt, the town has a depressing view of the afterlife. For most of us, January is destined to forever be little more than a living purgatory, the penance one pays for getting to February and its softer, kinder dance with winter's waning weeks.
